Fractional Chief AI Officer
A fractional Chief AI Officer who has done the technical work
A fractional Chief AI Officer puts a working executive in the chair a few days a month to own your AI strategy end to end. That covers which bets get funded, how the work gets governed, who builds it, and the number you carry back to the board. Most AI budgets go to projects that demo well and never move a business number, and I own the seat that spots the difference before the money leaves the building. I bring close to three decades in security and technology leadership, I help write the OWASP standards for LLM and agentic-AI security, I am finishing a master's in applied data science and AI, and I advise the boards and investors who want a straight answer on what AI is worth to them.
What I own once I'm in the seat
- In the first few weeks I map every place AI already lives in your company, the funded pilots and the shadow tools your teams signed up for without telling anyone. Then I rank them by what they can return and kill the ones that only look good in a demo. You end up with a plan that has dollars on every line, what each move costs, what it should pay back, and how we will know it worked.
- I stand up the room where AI decisions get made and I run it. That means settling who signs off on a model, what a use case has to prove before it ships, and how we track the payoff once it is live. Every project carries a number it has to hit, and I hold people to it, so a year in you can see which ones earned their keep and which ones should stop.
- I own the AI and ML bench. I bring in the people who build, the ML engineers, the applied scientists, the product leads who turn a model into something a customer touches, and I grow the ones already on the team. I fight to keep the strong ones from leaving, which is the part that decides whether you ever ship. If there is no team yet, I stand one up, and if there is one, I give it direction and cover.
- I work shoulder to shoulder with the people who run your technology and your business lines, so AI shows up where the work happens and gets used. A model that behaves in a controlled test still has to survive production, in front of paying customers, with money on the line, and that harder half of the job is the one I sign up for.
- I own the risk and compliance side so AI never becomes the reason you end up explaining yourself to a regulator. I stand up governance that maps cleanly to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework (NIST AI RMF), the EU AI Act, and ISO 42001. I put fairness and bias checks where a model touches a decision about a person, and I keep the kind of paper trail an auditor asks for on day one.
- I sit in front of your directors, your executives, and the investors writing the checks, and I tell them what the AI program spent, what it returned, and where the risk sits. When a board member asks whether the AI budget earned its place, you have someone in the room who answers in revenue, cost, and timing, with the numbers to back it.
- I keep watch on where the field is heading, so your money goes to the tools and methods that will still matter a year from now, and so a competitor's next launch never catches you flat.
What I bring to the seat
- I read the architectures. I understand how modern machine learning systems and large language models get built, and where they tend to break, so I can sit with your engineers and research teams and talk tradeoffs as a peer. When your team walks me through a design decision, I follow it and I push back where it needs pushing.
- I have run this at scale, with the stakes high and the clock running. I was the most senior information security leader at MarkWest through its roughly $20 billion combination, so I know how to move a big, tangled organization without breaking the parts that already work.
- I can get a board to act. I co-authored The CISO Evolution, a book about turning technical risk into language a board and a CFO will move on, and I advise directors and investors on AI risk today. When I walk your board through the AI program, they leave the room knowing what they need to decide.
- I keep the work pointed at outcomes you can measure. Every use case I approve comes with a business case and a number we agreed to hold it to, so the payoff from your AI spend is something you can put on one page and defend to the people who funded it.
Questions I get about the fractional CAIO work
- What does a fractional Chief AI Officer do?
- A fractional Chief AI Officer owns your AI transformation strategy and AI governance part-time: the vision, the priority use cases, the business case and ROI, the AI and ML team, and regulatory alignment across the NIST AI RMF, the EU AI Act, and ISO 42001, without a full-time executive hire.
- Are you technical, or governance-only?
- Technical. I'm finishing a master's in applied data science and AI, and I help write the OWASP standards for LLM and agentic-AI security. The governance I set comes from understanding how the systems work.
- How does this fit with a virtual CISO engagement?
- The virtual CISO role owns security across the whole company. The fractional CAIO role owns AI specifically. Some clients want one, some want both. I can take either seat.